This week a report entitled Shelter: Homelessness in a Growth Economy(Gordon Laird for the Sheldon Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership), which examines the issue of homelessness in Canada was released. Several cities are used as case studies in this report, and the chapter headings are quite telling:

IQALUIT: Discovering Canada’s Hidden Homeless
OTTAWA: The National Underclass
CALGARY: Poverty Amid Affluence
VANCOUVER: New Frontiers

And…..drum roll please……..TORONTO: Ground Zero. That’s right, not only are we the centre of the universe, we’re also at the epicenter of a national homelessness crisis.

“….Toronto has become significant in two ways: first, it represents the largest single mass of homeless people in Canada; and second, it displays the first and probably most chronic failure of the containment and management response proffered by governments across Canada. The Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and Toronto in particular, became a catchment area for dispossessed people across central Canada: some 31,985 homeless people (including 4,779 children) stayed in a Toronto shelter at least once during 2002, according to the City of Toronto’s 2003 Housing and Homelessness Report Card” (p. 41).

The city’s controversial 2006 Street Needs Assessment (aka the ‘homeless count’), insensitive and inaccurate as it was (the TDRC explains why here)made one thing clear: First Nations people are disproportionately represented among the homeless, and stay homeless longer than other groups. The City’s entire report can be found here.

The release of this week's report was timed beautifully (although I am not sure whether it was deliberate) to coincide with today’s National Day of Action for Aboriginal Peoples . I was thus very (pleasantly) surprised to see that the report referred to Canadian Aboriginal policies as hearkening back to the Victorian Era:

“Here, as elsewhere, homelessness is the new Indian reserve, not only because Aboriginals are highly over-represented among the ranks of the homeless, but also because policy, especially during the 1990s, came to resemble that of 19th century Canada. Quite literally, it is in major centres like Toronto that our response to homelessness most clearly recalls Victorian social practice – a return to the days when paupers, criminals and the mentally ill were often warehoused in the same poor houses that resemble the modern emergency shelter both in form and function……….” (p. 41-42).

Further, one First Nations woman notes that “Emergency shelters are the Indian reservations of the 21st century” (p. 47). This phrasing is pointed and clear – perhaps this language should be used in deputations to City Council.

However, there was something key missing from this report: global city politics. Although this issue was briefly mentioned in the chapter on Vancouver, what about Toronto? There are as many ways to measure and define a ‘global city’ as there are world city theorists (which are many), but Toronto is increasingly described in the literature as a global city, albeit a second tier or ‘beta’ city. But even if world city theorists cannot agree on how exactly to define a global city, they generally agree that the more articulated (...read more...)